It would take a new breed of "triangulating" technocrat Democrats to really dismantle the carefully built net designed, after the last Great Depression, to restrain Wall Street from its pattern of periodic self-immolations.

I think the conversation about Barack Obama "triangulating" is largely coming up now because it fits a familiar narrative -- an embattled Democratic president facing a confident Republican majority and a disappointed base.

It will quiet all the talk about Obama's supposed "triangulating," because it demonstrates -- for the time being, anyway -- that even as the White House sees a need to trade away some core liberal priorities to compromise with Repubilcans, Obama seems to want to bring the left along with him, to whatever degree he can.

"You might call it, if you went back to the Clinton era, a kind of triangulating where the president is now floating somewhere between the Republican Party and his congressional Democrats, and it is a difficult strategy to pull off but if he can do it, it is a smart one," said Fortier.